Summary: Optimizing Environment Maps for Material Depiction
Adrien Bousseau1,2
Emmanuelle Chapoulie1
Ravi Ramamoorthi2
Maneesh Agrawala2
1 REVES / INRIA Sophia Antipolis 2 University of California, Berkeley
(a) Our optimized lighting emphasizes materials (b) Poor lighting de-emphasizes materials
Figure 1: Our method (a) automatically optimizes the lighting to enhance material-specific visual features. The lighting reveals
the thin and thick parts of the subsurface scattering wax candle, it accentuates the Fresnel reflections along the side of the
porcelain vase and it adds strong specular highlights to emphasize the shiny chrome metal of the sculpture. Poorly designed
lighting (b) diminishes these characteristic visual features of the materials. The candle appears more like solid plastic, the vase
appears to be made of diffuse clay and the sculpture no longer looks like it is made of chrome.
Abstract
This technical report is an extended version of our EGSR 2011 paper. We present an automated system for opti-
mizing and synthesizing environment maps that enhance the appearance of materials in a scene. We first identify
a set of lighting design principles for material depiction. Each principle specifies the distinctive visual features
of a material and describes how environment maps can emphasize those features. We express these principles as
linear or quadratic image quality metrics, and present a general optimization framework to solve for the environ-
ment map that maximizes these metrics. We accelerate metric evaluation using an approach dual to precomputed
radiance transfer (PRT). In contrast to standard PRT that integrates light transport over the lighting domain to